Sleepless Afternoons

Review of The Passionate Attachment: America's Involvement with Israel, 1947 to the Present, by George W. Ball. 382 pp., W.W. Norton, 1992.

Avi Shlaim

London Review of Books, 25 February 1993.

The title of this book is inspired by George Washington's 1796 farewell
address. Washington counselled the new nation to refrain from a
'passionate attachment' to or an 'inveterate hatred' of any other
nation and to cultivate instead peace and harmony with all. A
passionate attachment to another nation, he warned, could create the
illusion of a common interest where no common interest exists. To
speak of America's passionate attachment to Israel involved a slight
exaggeration for, as Charles de Gaulle once remarked, there are no love
affairs between states. Even the love affair between American
Jews and Israel is only skin deep: American Jews admire Israel for her
body, while Israelis are attracted to American Jews for their money.

Nevertheless, Washington's farewell address does serve to spotlight the
two central themes of this wide-ranging and rather rambling book.
One theme is that America has been the loser in this relationship in
political and moral terms as well as in financial ones. The
second and related theme is that America's over-indulgent attitude
towards Israel has not been an unmixed blessing: 'If a passionate
attachment harms the infatuated country, it can equally injure the
nation that is the object of its unrequited affection' (p.313).
Even some of Israel's most devoted friends in
America would admit that she is not the most gracious or grateful of
partners. Henry Kissinger, a leading advocate of the strategic
partnership with Israel, had this to say on Israeli negotiating
tactics: 'In the combination of single-minded persistence and
convoluted tactics, the Israelis preserve in the interlocutor only
those last vestiges of sanity and coherence needed to sign the final
document.' No less revealing is Kissinger's comment on Yitzhak
Rabin, the present prime minister who had served as ambassador to
Washington in the early 1970s:

Yitzhak
had many extraordinary qualities, but the gift of human relations was
not one of them. If he had been handed the entire 'United States
Strategic Air Command' as a free gift he would have (a) affected the
attitude that at last Israel was getting its due, and (b) found some
technical shortcoming in the airplanes that made his accepting them a
reluctant concession to us.

A typical example of the way Israel exploits America
is provided by the saga of the Lavi aircraft. To secure American
agreement to this hare-brained project in 1982, Israel assured America
that the planes to be produced would be solely for Israeli use.
Yet early the following year the Israeli Aircraft Industries issued a
marketing brochure entitled 'Lavi - the affordable fighter'. The
Pentagon opposed the Lavi from the beginning, as did the State
Department. One State Department official remarked that 'they
were going to build this airplane. All they needed was American
technology and American money.' The proposal reminded another
State Department official of the tale of the tramp with a stone who
offered to use the stone to cook soup for an old lady. If the old
lady would only find him a pot, water, some carrots, potatoes, onions,
meat, and seasoning, he would benevolently share the soup with the old
lady. The Lavi project had to be abandoned because it was beyond
Israel's capacity. By the time it was finally killed, America had
provided more than 50 percent of the technology and 90 percent of the
funding.

Moshe Dayan summed up the Israeli view of the special relationship when
he said that 'Our American friends give us money, arms and
advice. We take the money, we take the arms but we decline the
advice.' As well as pursuing single-mindedly their own national
interests, Israelis, with characteristic chuzpah, tend to assume that
they know better than American leaders what is in the American
interest. All too often in this highly unequal relationship, it
has been the tail that wags the dog.

For America the relationship with the Jewish state has always been a
deeply sensitive, complex and controversial issue. At the outset,
American economic aid for Israel was justified on humanitarian and
idealistic grounds. As the only authentic democracy in the Middle
East, it used to be argued, Israel deserved American encouragement and
support. After Israel's resounding military victory in the June
1967 war, however, support for Israel was increasingly justified on the
grounds that it was in America's interest. Israel came to be seen
not simply as an economic mendicant, but as a military giant.
Israel, it was argued, was a strong, stable and reliable ally whose
presence in the region served to check the influence of the Soviet
Union and of the radical Arab regimes allied to Moscow. In short,
Israel was not just a democracy worthy of support but a strategic asset
for the United States in the Middle East.

The development of the strategic partnership with Israel was bound to
affect America's entire policy towards the Middle East. American
policy-makers were divided into two broad schools of thought, the
even-handed school and the Israel-first school. The even-handed
school, of which George Ball was a leading member, argued that America
should not identify too closely or exclusively with Israel because this
could jeopardize America's other vital interests in the Middle East
such as the friendship of the moderate Arab countries and access to
oil. The rival school, which gained the upper hand in the Nixon
administration, maintained that Israel was America's only reliable ally
in the region and that it should therefore be given all the material
support and political backing it needed to preserve the regional status
quo which was favourable to American interests. If this support
antagonized the Arabs, it did not matter since they needed America more
than America needed them.
Another way of dividing American policy-makers is into regionalists and
globalists. The regionalists, of which George Ball is again
a leading example, maintain that the problems of the Middle East are
home-grown rather than the result of Soviet instigation and that
American policy should be directed at solving or alleviating these
problems. Unqualified support for Israel, according to this
school, is emphatically not the way to go about solving these problems,
above all the Palestinian problem. The globalists, on the other
hand, like Richard Nixon, Henry Kissinger, Ronald Reagan and Alexander
Haig, looked at the Middle East as just one arena in their global fight
against the Soviet Union. For them Israel was not part of the
problem, but part of the solution.

The State Department, where George Ball had served as under-secretary
in the Johnson administration, is the natural stronghold of the
regionalists. The White House has tended to be the stronghold of
the globalists, especially when inhabited by a Republican
president. American policy towards the Middle East consists of
frequent swings of the pendulum between the pro-Arab State Department
and the usually pro-Israeli White House. AIPAC, the
America-Israel Public Affairs Committee, popularly known as the Jewish
lobby, is also an actor in the policy-making process although it
receives surprisingly little attention in this book. AIPAC was
established, in the words of its founder, I.L. Kenen, 'to lobby the
Congress to tell the President to overrule the State Department.'

During the Reagan presidency, AIPAC fully fulfilled its original
mission. Of all American presidents since 1945, Ronald Reagan has
been the most globalist in outlook and the most pro-Israeli.
Reagan spent many sleepless afternoons in the White House worrying
about the Soviet threat. This worry powerfully reinforced his
sentimental attachment to Israel. As the authors point out,
because the Cold War supplied the coordinates by which Reagan charted
all aspects of foreign policy, he warmly embraced the doctrine that
Israel was an important US strategic asset.

In a sharp break with a bipartisan American policy going back to 1967,
Reagan declared that the Israeli settlements on the West Bank were not
illegal. Unlike Jimmy Carter, he had no sympathy whatever with
the Palestinian claim of the right to national
self-determination. On the PLO, Reagan also followed the Israeli
line that it was a terrorist organization pure and simple and that
negotiating with it was therefore totally out of the question. He
even adopted the Israeli position towards the Camp David accords,
stating that he would 'continue to support the process as long as
Israel sees utility in it.'

This undiluted 'Israel first' policy encouraged Israel to persist in
its diplomatic intransigence just when her Arab neighbours seemed
prepared to make peace with her and, worse still, to embark on her
ill-fated invasion of Lebanon in 1982. Reagan and his Secretary
of State, Alexander Haig, were sufficiently ignorant and gullible to
believe that Israel could create a new political order in Lebanon and
that this would serve to undermine the Soviet position in the
region. During the war, America was drawn ever more deeply into
the Lebanese quagmire and ended up as a co-belligerent with Israel in
its war with the Arabs. When Reagan, or rather the State
Department regional experts, belatedly came up with the sensible and
even-handed peace plan which bore his name, prime minister Menachem
Begin peremptorily rejected it as a threat to Israel's very existence
and declared it 'a lifeless stillborn.' The old pattern of Israel
taking American money and American arms but declining American advice
re-asserted itself with a vengeance. The authors are critical of
Reagan for his handling of the crisis in Lebanon but not as critical as
one would expect them to be, possibly because the senior author had
devoted a whole book to this subject, appropriately entitled Error and
Betrayal in Lebanon.

George Bush did not share Reagan's sentimental attachment to American
Jews or the Jewish state. In private, Bush would point out that
he had been vice-president for eight years in the most pro-Israeli
administration in American history but got only five percent of the
Jewish vote when he ran for president in 1988, so he owed nothing to
American Jewry. Nor was Bush, a former oil executive,
particularly sympathetic to Israel. But it took the ending of the
Cold War and the Gulf War to bring about a decisive change in American
policy towards Israel. With the collapse of the Soviet Union and
the orphaning of its Arab clients, Israel was no longer needed to
safeguard American interests in the Middle East, if that is what it had
been doing. During the Gulf War the best service that Israel
could render its senior partner was to sit tight, keep a low profile
and do nothing.

Characteristically, the Likud government headed by Yitzhak Shamir tried
to extract from Washington the highest possible price for its passive
co-operation in defeating Saddam Hussein. But when the Bush
administration tried to promote a peaceful solution to the Arab-Israeli
conflict, it met with a singularly unco-operative attitude in
Jerusalem. Even when the Shamir government reluctantly agreed to
participate in the American-sponsored peace process, it rejected the
principle of trading land for peace and continued to build settlements
in the occupied territories.

The straw that broke the camel's back, however, was Shamir's request
for a $10 billion loan guarantee to finance the absorption of Soviet
Jews in Israel. Shamir pushed AIPAC to wage a battle against the
Bush administration on this issue. Bush won this battle hands
down, weakening AIPAC and discrediting Shamir in the process.
Indirectly, but consciously and skilfully, Bush also helped to bring
about a Likud defeat and a Labour victory in the June 1992 general
election. What Bush in effect told the Israelis was that they
could not have American money if they chose to disregard American
advice. The battle over the loan guarantee thus marked something
of a turning-point in the history of the relations between America and
Israel.
Throughout this far from dispassionate study, the authors emphasise the
cost of 'the passionate attachment.' They calculate that between
1948 and 1991, America subsidized Israel to the tune of $53
billion. This exceeds the aggregate assistance that the United
States gave Western Europe under the Marshall Plan. Rarely in the
annals of human history have to few owed so much to so many. Nor
can the cost be measured in financial terms alone. The political
and moral cost of the passionate attachment has been considerable.
Israel's disdain for international norms involves America in a pattern
of hypocrisy and makes a mockery of its claim to moral
leadership. Two examples are used to illustrate this point.
First, America poses as the champion of human rights, yet silently
watches while the Israeli army systematically violates the human rights
of the Palestinians in the occupied territories. Second, America
declares its opposition to the spread of nuclear, biological and
chemical weapons, then turns a blind eye to Israel's activities in all
these areas. True, the Bush administration did put forward a plan
for halting the production of nuclear weapons in the Middle East, but
the Israelis took the view that a bomb in the hand is worth ten in the
Bush. From both the financial and the moral aspects, the fundamental
question posed by the authors is: 'Are we getting anything faintly
resembling a reasonable return from the costs we are incurring?'
The evidence presented in this book points to an emphatically negative
answer.

Throughout this book, the Balls, father and son, remain on solid ground
in their critique of Israel and their critique of uncritical American
support for Israel. Where they are on much shakier ground is in
depicting Israel as almost exclusively responsible for all the errors
and betrayals committed by the two countries since 1947. But if
America is not her brother's keeper, nor is Israel. America's
sins should therefore not be visited upon Israel. America must
bear the full responsibility for her own actions and for the
unfortunate consequences of these actions in perpetuating and
exacerbating the problems of the Middle East. As between the two
allies, the authors are decidedly not even-handed. They portray
Israel as the chief culprit and an evil influence, while America
emerges as a noble and altruistic Great Power committed to the highest
moral standards in world affairs. This view of America, in my
humble opinion, is best summed up in the authors' name.Back